TIME SHARE: JANE BUSTIN and ALEXIS HARDING
Site specific paintings 30 June - 5 August 2005

Time Share brings together work by Jane Bustin and Alexis Harding and the first-floor space of the Eagle Gallery. The exhibition is not a collaboration between these three elements, but the outcome of two independent considerations of the room in relation to time, a theme already found in these artists' work.

Bustin and Harding belong to a generation of British abstract painters whose work has been most readily defined by descriptions of its process. Their work also has an acknowledged metaphorical intention and, invited to make paintings specifically for this space, the artists' approaches reflected contrasts and crossing-points. Not only are they characteristic of their own divergent practices, but also of non-objective painting in Britain today.

Harding chose to work in the gallery on a number of large-scale paintings that will alter and change while they are in the space. Typical of his interest in the materiality of the medium, he will allow paint to behave naturally according to its own properties. The artist is on hand to respond to or deny its natural inclination to shift, part and slide with time and the pull of gravity. An object emerges from this industrious passage of activity: stuff is drawn off, gathered and lanced into a surface that gives up a record of itself. As the artist has observed: 'When you put something down (like paint on a surface), why should you expect it to be there when you return?'

Bustin also uses action to bring about an outcome. Like Harding, the result can often surprise her although her method grows more out of conscious prediction, measurement and calibration. Within her latest paintings is the experience of journeys through London, repeatedly traversing the terrain and streetscape between a suburban starting point and an urban destination. The constant and systematic laying of one surface upon another builds an expanse inflected by what went before. Edge and picture plane therefore interrelate like the daily absorption of phenomena, natural and mental, or the flow from this moment to the next.

Both painters' work is evidently engendered by process. Both have evolved ways of making images where the presence of the artist's hand has been eradicated as 'mark', in any conventional sense. Bustin's work employs various kinds of supports - aluminium, wood, gesso, silk, velvet - to create subtle nuances with oil paint applied in thin transparent layers, while the final image of Harding's painting is achieved by tilting, smearing and shaking the surface of the painting during the drying time of oil paint on MDF or aluminium, on to which gloss paint is poured in a mesh or grid of wet paint on wet.

Neither artist, however, falls easily into the category of purely mechanist abstraction. Harding is on record as wanting his paintings 'to be emotional, and unashamedly so', while Bustin has for some years used source material from literature, music and other paintings which she references in formal decisions about how the paintings are made.
Inherent in both artists' work is a dependence on and manipulation of time - in the process of making and, perhaps most importantly, in how the work is
received through the eye by the mind.

Alexis Harding’s work is shown in association with the Andrew Mummery Gallery, London

The publication Time Share with text by Martin Holman is available from the gallery, price £ 6.